Multiple retractions in spoken French and spoken German. A contrastive study in oral performance styles

Category-building lists between grammar and interaction

“…Consider (2) above: what the speaker actually does, after proposing a first formulation, is scanning a paradigm for possible better alternatives and finally choosing the most appropriate. Hesitations and disfluency phenomena, as in (5) below, also rely on a formulation listing pattern in our view (see also Auer & Pfänder, 2007).…”

“…Under this view, the object "list" is a highly abstract linguistic pattern that encompasses a number of more specific phenomena that are traditionally ascribed to different domains of analysis and thus treated separately, such as coordination, repetition, reduplication, co-compounding, reformulation and disfluency. In this sense, the term is reminiscent of the notion of 'retraction' as used by Auer & Pfänder (2007).…”

The discursive construction of categories. Categorisation as a dynamic and co-operative process

“…Moreover, a list is also formed by optional elements that may or may not occur, such as connectives linking the various exemplars and elements that have the function of list completers (Jefferson, 1990), as is the case for general extenders (Overstreet, 1999). Lists are also considered by Auer and Pfänder (2007) the product of retraction, one of the basic operations of spoken syntax. "In a retraction, a paradigmatic slot in an emergent syntactic unit is used twice, i.e.…”

“…One last example can be represented by structures that are both forward and backwards oriented, which I will refer to here as unfinished lists. This construction, just as the "common" lists described above, is produced out of retraction, in that it involves the multiple usage of a syntactic slot; more precisely, in almost all the cases observed in the KIParla corpus, the retraction is anchored (Auer and Pfänder, 2007), that is, it is formally marked by the repetition of its initial element. At the same time, the construction is also forward-oriented in that the repeated element, typically a determiner or a preposition, syntactically projects a completion that is either remains unfulfilled, or it is filled by paraverbal material.…”

“…The element prosodically attached to the second determiner can be interpreted as a paraverbal contextualisation cue signalling that the list is relevantly unfinished. According to Auer and Pfänder (2007), this configuration involving the repetition of a syntactic anchor is frequently used as a hesitation marker in cases where the speakers search for appropriate lexical item. This holds true also in a case like (17), but, in addition, I argue that signalling the inappropriateness of a particular lexical item may actually be the trigger that invites ad hoc categorisation.…”